About.com Luna Network

[cyberbear]

Has anyone had any experience with About.com's Luna Network? Is it worth putting their banner and search box on every page of your site? Anyone with any experience please let me know. Here is a part of the email I received.

**PLEASE FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR DEVELOPING ONLINE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS**

I'm writing to present you with a unique business opportunity that About.com is now making available to a select group of quality sites that focus on E-commerce. After reviewing your site, we feel that your site may have what we are looking for in an About.com Luna Network member:

·Focus on niche topic highly relevant to [ecommerce.about.com...]
·Quality content
·Editorial integrity

I have a proposal which outlines the program in detail including how you can leverage your site's traffic and niche focus to create greater advertising revenue and profits. This is a timely opportunity that we are currently presenting to several sites. We are planning to have these partnership agreements finalized in writing by 12/11/00.

Thanks guys for any help.

[cyberbear]

Have to make a decision in the next few days so if anyone has any experience with About.com's Luna network please let me know. From what I can tell they are an important directory and I believe that I can benefit from getting a special listing on their site. Thanks.

[Drastic]

A friend of mine tried them, and decided to cancel. Here are some reasons:

- more than just a banner, the table across the top of your site makes you look like part of about, can cause visitor confusion, and can cause fewer "hard looks" at your site.

- code at the top of your page can hurt SEO

- overpowers any branding

- can annoy users in general (depending on demographics)

- you have to do this to every page of your site

The site is a coupons/deals site, and these points would probably hurt the current revenue stream more than the CPM could make up for.

However, I think this could be an excellent deal for a content based site, or any site that doesn't generate much revenue on its own. Very good for a site that is mainly a CPM earner, I have heard they offer pretty good CPM deals.

Personally, I would only use them if it meant the additional revenue would be close to 50% (or more) of total site revenue.

I am not sure when you were contacted by them, but you may want to check out this thread:
[geekvillage.com...]

HTH,
Ken

[cyberbear]

Hi Drastic

Thanks for the info. I was contacted by them yesterday and I signed their non-disclosure agreement and received their full proposal which I am looking through now. My site is an ecommerce site and we do mostly merchant account sales, web hosting and design and shopping carts. Just trying to see would if it be worth it to put all their stuff on my site, every page. Worried it may slow down load time and hurt my rankings. Dont know how much traffic it will send even if they do promise a listing in the top right corner of the page, of the part of the site that is relevant to ours.

[rcjordan]

> more than just a banner, the table across the top of your site makes you look like part of about, can cause visitor confusion

I'll second the "confusing" part. The first thought is that About has acquired the site, the second is that they've framed a search return. Their brand is the one imprinted.

[cyberbear]

Maybe if I offer to put their search box on my site they will give me a directory listing which is what I wanted in the first place! The last thing I want is a slow loading site which looks like part of About.com. Thanks for the assistance everybody. But then on the other hand if they would generate lots of traffic to my site , it might be worth it. Has anyone any numbers on the number of visitors this program is capable of generating?

[cyberbear]

I am negotiating to join but not use their navigation bar. I will just display the banner and partnership box. I asked to have some control over what banners show.

It's worth a shot and they are compiling info now concerning several other concerns I had. They seem to be flexible. I will let everybody know how it turns out. At the very least I hope I get a directory link which is what I was trying for originally.